9 April 1940
The Royal Danish Army, Part One
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
November 2025

With Golden Journal No. 60: 9 April 1940, we introduce the Royal Danish Army to the Panzer Grenadier series. The title is the date on which German troops rolled into Denmark, with the government quickly ordering the Royal Army to stop its resistance. But not before it had indeed resisted, and those battles are at the heart of our Journal.

Despite resisting fascism only briefly during the six-hour war of 1940, Denmark has been a fairly pugnacious country throughout its existence, at one time ruling a North Sea Empire. Norway and southern Sweden eventually fell away. But the Danes fought in the Napoleonic Wars, fought the Germans, Prussians and Austrians in 1848 and 1864, sat out most of the 20th Century conflicts, and then (proportionate to population) had a major presence with NATO in Afghanistan, losing more soldiers per capita than any other participant.

Like most European nations, Denmark paid little attention and even less money to national defense in the years following the First World War. Military stood at about 1 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), even less than her Nordic peers, much less neighboring Germany. As tensions rose and war seemed more likely, Danish spending rose as well, to 1.2 percent of GDP in 1935 and 2 percent in 1938. This was still much less than countries like Sweden (rising from 1.6 percent to 2.7 percent). Industrialization came late to Denmark, and in 1940 the kingdom’s economy remained primarily agricultural.

In 1937, the Royal Danish Army prepared a mobilization plan (Krigsstyrkeplan 1937) and a modified version two years later (Mobiliseringsplan 1939). Both plans clearly saw Germany as the potential future threat. Both plans kept the army’s peacetime leadership in place, which meant that Danish senior officers in 1940 were, on average about a decade older than their German counterparts.

The army’s seven line regiments would form two divisions. The Jylland (Jutland) Division would defend the mainland, and drew most of its recruits there. The Sjaelland (Zealand) Division had responsibility for the Danish islands; the division received its recruits from the islands but detached some battalions to reinforce the defenses on Jutland. In addition, the Royal Life Guard Regiment protected the royal palace in Copenhagen.

As Europe prepared for a new round of war, some nations had trouble acquiring new weapons, even when they had the cash and the will to spend it. During the years before the Second World War, Denmark had a fairly robust industry for light arms, making its own rifles, machine guns and anti-aircraft guns, and licensed copies of French-designed mortars and artillery. Dansk Industri Syndikat (DISA) did a brisk international business selling the famed Madsen light machine gun and 20mm autocannon to dozens of foreign customers world-wide.

9 April 1940 includes two dozen of our wonderful die-cut and silky-smooth pieces, all of them representing the Danish troops, weapons, and leaders that fought to defend their country from German invasion. Let’s have a look at them.

Infantry

Like most armies of 1940, the Royal Danish Army’s 31 infantry battalions provided its backbone, in eight regiments, organized into two divisions. A Danish regiment had four battalions (the Royal Life Guard had but three); only one battalion of each regiment was fully-manned during peacetime except for the Guards, who were always on duty. One independent battalion defended Bornholm, but as most of its manpower came from the island’s reservists it was not included in the Danish structure.

Each Danish regiment had four battalions, numbered I through IV and carrying the number of their regiment as well (I/1, II/1 etc.), like most other armies of the time. As an artifact of early-century accounting practices, the War Ministry also assigned each battalion a serial number (1 through 31). Both of these numbering systems show up in accounts of the campaign, and even the Danes seem to have used them interchangeably. They also numbered each soldier within a battalion, the number also derived from his payroll slot, and officers often referred to their men by number.

During peacetime, each battalion had four companies (three rifle companies and one heavy weapons company), numbered 1 through 4. At full war strength, the 1937 mobilization plan called for some battalions to add one more rifle company, and sometimes an extra (fifth) rifle platoon to their companies. This appears to be a measure designed to hide any increase in army strength from Parliament and the Finance Ministry.

A Danish rifle company had a large headquarters (15 men), a recon squad of eight more men, and four platoons. Each of the platoons had four nine-man squads; with a similarly large platoon headquarters group (10 men: the platoon commander, sergeant, an “observer,” four grenadiers with rifle grenades, two runners/snipers, and an orderly), that gave the Danish platoon 46 men, slightly larger than the equivalent German unit. Danish riflemen (five men in each squad, and those in the relatively large battalion, company, and platoon HQ palace guards) carried the M1889 Krag-Jørgensen bolt-action rifle, a licensed and modified version of a Norwegian weapon that was also adopted by the United States. The Danish Krag was chambered for 8mm rounds, and had a very long barrel that gave it outstanding accuracy and also made it cumbersome in action. The Danes would therefore also issue a carbine version, while after the occupation the Germans issued the long-barreled version to their own forces as a sniper rifle. On paper at least, all Danish riflemen carried the carbine version except two marksmen attached to platoon headquarters, but photo evidence shows the long rifle still carried by riflemen in 1940.

Each Danish squad included a machine-gun team of two men operating a Madsen machine gun, a weapon first adopted in 1901 (when its inventor, V.H.O. Madsen, fortuitously served as Minister of War). The Madsen would be exported around the world, seeing action in both world wars and long afterwards; at least one Madsen has seen action in Ukraine. It was a light-weight and reliable weapon, and in Danish service fired the same round as the Krag rifle. The Danes did not issue a light mortar, relying on machine guns and rifle grenades for platoon-level support.

Danish infantry train with the M1889/24 carbine.

Three squads in a Danish platoon included a Madsen light machine-gun, mounted on a bipod with a two-man crew. The fourth squad had the same weapon, but mounted on a tripod with a three-man crew, and filling the role of heavy machine gun (Danish army slang of the period called the entire weapon a “tripod”). The “light” version came with two spare barrels, the “heavy” with four. Danish companies had no separate machine-gun platoons, with the heavy machine guns instead distributed among the rifle platoons. Each battalion had a heavy weapons company, with three machine-gun platoons and one 81mm mortar platoon.

The Mobile Battalion

Aware of their army’s relative immobility, the Danish high command addressed this in both mobilization plans. The 4th Battalion (I/6) had bicycles for most of its riflemen and motorcycles for some of them. A full-time unit during peacetime, stationed at Odense on Funen, it had been brought close to wartime strength and moved to the border region.

Pictures taken on 9 April 1940 show Danes riding bicycles and motorcycles, but that was only true for a very small slice of the mobilized troops. They did, however, see more combat than their proportion might indicate.

Two Danes, a Nimbus C motorcycle, and their 20mm autocannon.

The Danish Army had begun buying motorcycles in 1938, favoring the locally-produced Nimbus Bumblebee, in its sidecar version. Denmark did not produce trucks, and this seemed to offer a cost-effective way of motorizing at least part of the Royal Army (Germany and the Soviet Union established their own motorcycle troops for much the same reason).

Most of those shiny new bikes went to couriers, while the Royal Danish Air Force claimed several hundred for airfield security detachments. Others remained at training areas. The mobile battalion therefore had, on paper, just one platoon of motorcycle infantry and less than that when the Germans came.

The Danish mobilization plan called for the mobile battalion to field a complete fourth, motorcycle-mounted company that would take the place of a standard infantry battalion’s heavy weapons company. That would allow the battalion’s heavy weapons to more than match that of the bicycle-mounted infantry; it would have been a great effort to ask of the cyclists to puff along, pulling an anti-tank gun behind them.

The motorcycle company would include the M29 heavy machine gun platoons just like the straight-leg rifle companies, except that they were carried on motorcycles, with the sidecar replaced by a cargo platform built to hold the machine gun. Instead of mortars, the company had four 20mm Madsen autocannon (see below). These were also carried on motorcycles in the same way as the machine guns and could in theory be fired from them, but Danish crews usually dismounted them and fired from the ground. Both the machine-gun and autocannon-carrying motorcycles had an accompanying ammunition vehicle; other variants served as ambulances and radio stations. The small motorcycle contingents that saw action on 9 April included both the autocannon- and machine-gun-carrying bikes.

Reinforced by the 3rd Regiment’s anti-tank company, the 4th Battalion fought well on 9 April, for the few hours that the war lasted. As planned, their mobility allowed them to occupy their defensive positions before the Germans could seize them by surprise. Had the war lasted more than six hours, the Danes might have felt the need for the mobile reserve foreseen by the mobilization plan.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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